It's a beautiful, if imperfect, antidote to crop-damaging cold.
May flowers don’t always arrive on time. Just ask the winemakers of northern Italy, whose vineyards are currently threatened by unseasonably frosty weather that could damage millions of euros’ worth of product.
But luckily for their grapes, their customers, and our Instagrams, these enterprising farmers have come up with a visually stunning—if incomplete—solution to the freezing temperatures. Throughout the regions of South Tyrol, Trentino, and (slightly more southern) Tuscany, winemakers have lit hundreds of torches to keep their grapes viable and—as an added, perhaps unintentional bonus—to turn the Italian wine country into a scene out of a children’s storybook. Have a look, for example, at the vineyards of Novacella, in South Tyrol.
According to the Italian news service Ansa, the region has not seen such low temperatures in May since 1987. Local winemaker Andreas Huber told Ansa that temperatures one degree below zero (Celsius) are potentially very damaging to the crops, and the temperature around him has fallen to between three and nine degrees Celsius below zero in the past week.
While The Local reports that 300 torches can raise the temperature in one hectare by about three degrees Celcius—and while that difference can certainly mitigate some of the damage—the torches are unlikely to fully protect the agricultural industry. The farmers’ union Coldiretti, according to The Local, estimates that losses from the inclement weather will still add up to millions of euros.
This is hardly the first time that farmers have gotten creative to keep crops warm. Orange growers in Southern California were once famous for the practice of "smudging." By burning fuel oil in "smudge pots" that lined the groves, farmers heated the air during chilly nights. The practice began around 1910, and by 1915, at least one million pots were actively smudging the citrus. While this raised temperatures, it also sent unwanted soot flying over people's laundry lines and into their homes. Several times during the 1920s and 30s, according to KCET, darkness from the smudge even closed the Port of Los Angeles and forced drivers to keep their headlights on during the daytime. The practice is no longer allowed, but the challenges of keeping oranges warm remain.
There's a benefit to being able to eat almost anything.
New York City’s Upper West Side has a long history with unusual animals becoming part of the scenery. Just ask Harry, Jim, and Phil, the peacocks who live on the grounds of Saint John the Divine, one of the world’s largest cathedrals.
So the goats who are going to move into two acres of Riverside Park this summer may not seem too out of place. In an effort to control invasive plants that keep growing in the steep, sloping parts of the park, which staffers have trouble accessing, the Riverside Park Conservancy will introduce to the area a squad of 24 goats, which can both stand the slanted ground and stomach the pesky weeds. The goats will occupy the grounds from May 21 to August 30, in an initiative the Park Conservancy is calling “Goatham.”
These “summer interns”—as the Conservancy’s president and CEO, Daniel Garodnick, calls them—will have a fairly wide selection of invasive snacks to choose from. The options include the sumptuous-sounding wineberry and porcelain berry plants, the full-bodied bittersweet and multifloral rose, and—of course—piquant poison ivy, which the park’s guests can fortunately “gulp down ... without a second thought,” according to the Goatham webpage. They can, in fact, “consume 25% of their own body weight in vegetation in just one day.” At that rate, they might put such a dent in the weeds that they could erase them from the landscape altogether. We know what you’re thinking: “If the goats are going to eat so much, what will the park do with all the excrement?” It's all part of the plan—it will just enrich the soil.
This all makes for not only an effective sustainability program, but also a valuable opportunity for public education. The goats, says Garodnick, offer a model for how to treat damaged landscapes without relying on chemicals. To get the message out to the public, the Conservancy will partner with Columbia University, which will send scientists to conduct live testing on the soil’s quality throughout the goats’ stay.
Larry Cihanek, whose organization Green Goats is providing the park with the fleet, says that the most “visually interesting” goats were chosen for the project in order to maximize public engagement and attention. (The organization owns about 180 in total.) They do not need training for a project like this, he adds, as eating these kinds of weeds is just a day’s work for goats. The animals are unique, says Cihanek, in the sense that they’ll “eat the junk stuff that no other animal would eat,” and because their digestive tracts neutralize seeds. Once deposited, in other words, their droppings won't produce a new generation of weeds.
Cihanek says he’s glad to collaborate on environmental issues with cities, in particular, because people don’t often associate livestock with urban environments, and thus don’t appreciate the benefits the animals can offer. (In years past, Green Goats worked on similar projects with Prospect Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park.) That may be true, but New York City’s connection with goats actually runs very deep. The city’s nickname “Gotham,” in fact, actually comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term for “Goat’s Town.”
Atlas Obscura readers share their most unforgettable encounters with strangers on airplanes.
One of the mundane horrors of air travel is being trapped just inches (or less) from total strangers. Even in the most spacious of first-class sections, the personal space of every passenger is squished together, creating an invisible Venn diagram of potential awkwardness and irritation. But every so often, this forced intimacy can also lead to powerful moments of connection with total strangers.
Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us their greatest stories of meeting strangers on airplanes, and the responses made us want to fly coach just for the chance to relive them. From chance encounters that turned into lifelong friendships, to strange brushes with celebrity, to quiet connections between two humans at 30,000 feet, your stories were often touching and always incredible.
Read some of our favorite responses below, and if you have your own unforgettable story about meeting a stranger on a plane, tell us about it in the forums and keep the conversation going! The common saying goes that the journey is more important than the destination, but after reading your stories of airline strangers, it's clear that sometimes, it's all about the people you meet along the way.
The Upside to Children on Planes
“She was a mother with a baby and a toddler, a little overwhelmed and looking resigned about the looks of trepidation fellow passengers were giving her, since it was a 13-hour flight from the U.S. to Asia and the second of three legs for me—the total always ends up to about a day, give or take. They were technically seated right behind me. Throughout the flight, I would borrow the baby and amuse the toddler, to give her breaks. It was going to be their first time to meet their mother’s side of the family.
This happened over a decade ago and at that time I had gotten the news that my father might pass away, having had a massive stroke, which led to a sudden flight to go back home in a race against time. He ended up surviving but bedridden with a worsening case of Alzheimer’s, no longer able to care for himself or remember us until he passed away eight years later.
The distraction afforded by the mother’s plight distracted me from my own concerns, and I still think of her and her kids. They made me think of the future, that the world doesn’t stop for our pain and that life goes on.
On particularly rough days, when I’m sure I can’t possibly endure, I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days so far is 100%. And that’s pretty good.” — AnyaPH
What If?
“[She] was a South American woman I met in the airport in the mid-1980s when our flight was delayed by bad weather. I’d grabbed a soda and gone into the lounge and found an open seat at a table she was at, and asked if she minded if I sat there. Soon enough we started talking and she turned out to be smart and funny and charming and as the delay got longer as the weather got worse, we got deeper into things and I was surprised (unfairly, I know, but still) to learn that a lovely young woman was in the business of streamlining operations for the meat-packing industry, and so there went three hours, and when we finally boarded we found we were sitting next to one another and the whole thing was delightful and kinda sexy and I got her info and we kept in touch for a short while, but you know the way things go. I lost the paper and we lost touch, and decades go by and to this day I think about her from time to time because I think she was one of those doors you come across in life that make you wonder where you’d be if you opened it.” — carouselreversalspra
Love at First Flight
“I met a man on a flight from Lisbon to Vienna (he was going from one conference to another and I had a connecting flight on a vacation). We talked the entire flight, exchanged emails and continued talking until baggage claim. Two days later we met for coffee, and I joined him on his way to the CAT train, where he kissed me. We continued emailing, and after many daily emails, two trips each, back and forth between NYC and Dublin, we got engaged a year after we met.” — goldbergship
Everyone Needs a Helping Hand
“I was traveling from a stopover in Iceland back home to Boston, just having spent a birthday week with one of my favorite people in Sweden. I was sad, as the ending of an adventure-filled week was setting in. A nice couple sat next to me, the woman in the middle seat. I noticed her, white-knuckled and praying, already wishing the flight was over, just minutes after we had taken off. We hit some light turbulence an hour or so into the flight, and she went into an almost panic attack, grabbing my hand. We sat that way for the rest of the flight, as she told me about their trip to Iceland and her son who lives in Boston and that she’s from Brazil, near where my sister-in-law grew up.
She kept asking if it was okay if she held my hand, that it was helping her get through the flight. Her husband was grateful. And so was I, in a way, as it helped me get out of my own head about leaving Sweden and Iceland going home and back to the real world the next day… I’m not sure whose flight was improved more, hers or mine.” — lwoodruff
False Alarm
“I was living in Louisville, Kentucky, working as a graphic designer at the newspaper, and flying home to visit family in Colorado. I was seated next to a Jean-Claude Van Damme look-alike who was a sportscaster for the Swiss National TV station, flying to Salt Lake City to cover the Olympics. He was very excited to see the Rockies on the last leg of his flight from DIA to SLC.
At one point, I told him that I thought we were getting close to Denver, and that he may be able to see the Rockies in the distance. But as we looked below us at the ground, it looked like eastern Colorado was covered with a glittering blanket of snow. I kept commenting things like ‘Wow! There must have been a huge snowstorm that covered everything so thoroughly! I can’t even see any trees!’ Eastern Colorado is pretty barren, but usually you can see a few roads, at least. As we got closer and closer to the snow, I wondered why nobody else seemed nervous.
Eventually, it looked like we were about to crash land right into this crystalline ground covering. I had this poor newscaster (and myself!) SO convinced that what we were looking at was, in fact, snow-covered ground, that we held hands and squeezed our eyes shut as the plane touched it. When we emerged on the bottom side of the smoothest cloud bank I have ever seen, we let go of each other’s hands, laughed hysterically, and enjoyed watching the brown farmland of eastern Colorado roll beneath the plane as we landed uneventfully.
I have never felt so stupid in my life.” — DBurk78
A Picture Perfect Friendship
“So I met this woman Carla, and she and I had such a similar background that we talked for the whole three-hour flight. We stayed in contact and then we didn’t talk for a few years until I got engaged and messaged her, and she agreed to photograph my wedding. Before the wedding I flew out to Kansas, where she lived, so we could do my bridal photos and my engagement photos. She became my best friend and she shot the wedding and my Indian reception seven months later. She is one of the most amazing women I have ever met and she gave me something I never expected, and that was photos where she captured my beauty and showed me I was beautiful. I will forever treasure our relationship, photos, and the part she played in my wedding (she was basically a family member by the time the wedding rolled around). She was also involved in shooting the announcement of my pregnancy, and she is just so amazing. I will forever thank God for placing me in the seat next to her.” — nicolechanna89
Hope in the Aisle Seat
“Last June, on a six-hour flight from New York, I had the honor of sitting next to Deborah Greenberg, the widow of civil rights legend, Jack Greenberg, one of the attorneys who argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, and who would later represent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after his arrest in Alabama. We talked for a long time about the ailing state of our nation, and I asked her what Jack would have thought of our current president (Jack died right before 45 was sworn in), and how he’d feel about the fragile state of our democracy. She said, ‘Jack would’ve thought we’d bounce back,’ and she flashed me a hopeful smile. Deborah, now in her 80s, and herself an accomplished civil rights attorney, was charming, perky and quick-witted. She downplayed her own accomplishments (even though she’s met a few presidents and argued before the Supreme Court), and lovingly reminisced about her husband’s decades-long work with the NAACP, and revealed that he was only 27-years-old when he had the honor of working with Thurgood Marshall on our nation’s most monumental civil rights case, which she simply referred to as ‘Brown.’ So tonight, when you go to bed, just remember: we’re gonna bounce back. Because we’re a resilient nation, and there are still heroes out there ready to fight for equality and justice.” — katesmelia
For Victor
“Five or six years ago, as I sat at an airport gate in New Hampshire, I noticed the woman sitting next to me was with a little boy who was getting ready to fly alone. She was his aunt, as it turned out, and she was accompanying him to board his flight at the gate—but he was returning home alone to Louisville after a summer in New England (our plane was making two stops, Baltimore, then Louisville). I began chatting with them at the gate, and offered to help him while on the plane if he needed it, since he would be flying by himself. She was very appreciative of that. As it turned out, he was the sweetest, most delightful, clever little boy. His name was Victor. He boarded first, but saved me a seat (on Southwest there are no assigned seats). So I sat next to Victor when I got on board and he told me it was his first time flying alone. He was so excited but also a little nervous and I explained to him the things that would happen when we took off and landed. Victor told me his mom died while traveling, which really struck me. I didn’t want him to be scared about traveling. Thirty minutes into the flight, Victor was leaning on my shoulder and we were looking at pictures in the magazine together. He was so sweet and cute, and I was sad to leave him when I got off the plane in Baltimore! Victor hugged me and made me write down his dad’s phone number so I could call and talk to the two of them sometime. I knew I probably wouldn’t actually call, but I wrote his dad a brief note just saying it was a pleasure to fly with his son, and signed my name. Who knows, maybe one day when I’m an 85-year-old woman on a plane alone, Victor will be randomly seated next to me and talk to me throughout the flight.” — sarahweisberg
The Nebraska Connection
“Back in 1999, I flew to Ireland to do some studying and touring. I was a middle-aged farmgirl from the Sandhills of Nebraska, and this was my first time on ANY airplane. So traveling by jet over the Atlantic to a foreign country was almost overwhelming.
The young British man sitting next to me was friendly and struck up a conversation with me. I knew he was flying from the States, so I asked what he did while in the U.S. He said he and some mates went to Texas and worked on wheat harvesting crews that harvested fields of wheat for farmers, from Texas to North Dakota, then back down to Texas. I was very familiar with the harvest crews, traveling in long caravans of tractors, combines, trucks, and travel trailers going from wheat farm to wheat farm.
I asked him if his crew went through Nebraska. Yes. What towns did he go through? He could only remember a couple, Alliance, Hemingford, and Chadron. I told him I was born in Chadron, and my daughter lived in Alliance! We got to talking about it, and it turned out he’d had drinks at a bar in Alliance with her and some of her friends, and he told me some of their names. What are the odds of sitting next to a Brit, in a jet, halfway across the Atlantic, who just happened to have shared drinks with your daughter in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska?” — joanski56
Ali & The Kid
“En route to a Puerto Vallarta vacation, our young family was waiting at the South Bend airport when I recognized Muhammad Ali sitting down the way. It was well known in the area that, for years ‘The Greatest’ lived in relative seclusion on a riverfront farm in Buchanan, Michigan, about 15 miles away. My five-year-old son was too shy, but my gregarious three-year-old daughter accompanied me to meet the champ. We approached the entourage—his wife, Yolanda, three children and his longtime bodyguard and personal photographer—stopping at a respectful distance. Without hesitation, he stood and walked right to us, shaking hands and shakily asking my daughter for a high-five. It was a real thrill for me.
We board a tiny commuter plane for the 35 minute puddle-jump over Lake Michigan to the Mexico connection at Midway Airport. Ali and company then board, and he and Yolanda sit behind my daughter and me. In flight, she keeps looking between the seats, laughing. Ali is playing peek-a-boo.
The next morning, the kids are watching TV in the bedroom when I hear my daughter yelling, ‘High-five! High-five!’ In the bedroom, my daughter is jumping on the bed and Ali’s lighting the Olympic torch in Atlanta. He was front page news in all the papers, and we kept that picture on our fridge for probably 10 years. To this day, we refer to the The Greatest as ‘High-Five.’” — raymondlowey1
Nuclear Reactions
“I boarded a two-hour flight home once after an amazing trip that had me feeling radiant. I was sitting next to a much older man and don’t know how he got to talking but he started telling me all these stories about the nuclear facility where he worked. He told me about burying nuclear waste in old salt mines and the wire cage elevators and turning on a black light flashlight to scare off scorpions. He told me about a rabbit activating the security system for the whole building. How they had snipers on the roof so he never locked his car. He was a wonderful storyteller, and as he talked he was so lively and no longer looked old. I thought about asking to hang out at the arrival airport but then realized the Feds might track me down during his next background check, and instead just said goodbye.” — lightrailcoyote
Chance Mamita
“I was going to the Dominican Republic from the U.S. for the first time by myself. I normally always went with family or friends and I was so nervous. I sat by an older Dominican woman in the waiting area and began to speak with her and found myself telling her how nervous I was because I didn’t have friends in the city I was traveling to this time. She ended up taking me under her wing.
When we arrived to the DR, she waited for me outside the plane and guided me through the airport and told me that I was going with her (her grandson and daughter were coming to pick her up at the airport) and that they would drive me to my hotel. I know you’re not supposed to trust strangers, but there was something about this woman that was comforting. As soon as I got in the car her daughter handed me a mug of coffee and some cookies for the ride.
They dropped me off at my hotel and the next day I got a call from her to check in with me. It’s been two-and-a-half years now and we still talk every single day via Whatsapp, and I have even gone to stay in her family home in the DR. I now call her my ‘mamita’ (little mother) and she calls me her niece when she introduces me to others. Thanks to that random conversation she has become a part of my life.” — MissEffieLou
Winner Gets Bagels
“I was flying from New York City back home and seated next to a middle-aged businessman in a suit and tie, the polar opposite of who I was at the time (an artist in my mid-20s with black spiky hair and an attitude). After some polite chit-chat, our flight hit some significant turbulence, and he spilled his drink on his tie. He was very flustered. I ended up hanging the tie up in my window in an attempt to dry it, and the flight attendants initiated a cabin-wide trivia game to distract the passengers. He and I bonded and ended up winning the grand prize: New York bagels. I never questioned where they came from. His tie never dried, but he seemed far less concerned with it by the time we landed. Most fun I’ve ever had on a flight.” — Jeanine
Fields of Green
“Flying from Houston to Seattle, I struck up a conversation with a fellow that was obviously VERY happy. He started telling me about his wife, who had opened a cookie shop in their home town using her grandmother’s recipes. The day before they had sold their first franchise for Mrs. Field’s Cookies (named after her grandmother). Obviously that went well.” — redcurls100
Undercover Superstar
“About 15 years ago I was returning from an assignment in Switzerland on the always marvelous Swiss Air, this time in first class as business had been sold out. It was my first only and only time in this special lap of luxury, where I found myself seated directly next to the only other person in First. I immediately offered to move across the aisle… after all, there was plenty of room. ‘Please don’t,’ he said.
Looking directly at me, he asked, ‘You don’t know who I am?’ No, I admitted. ‘Sepp Trütsch.’ Still nothing. ‘What a very Swiss name,’ is the best I could offer. ‘I am the Swiss Johnny Carson, and the fact that you haven’t recognized me is why I asked to share your company. It’s so rare that I can enjoy someone’s simple presence, people become stagestruck and awkward, as I can show you later.’
In fact, I had noticed a pile of epaulets, one stacked atop the next, on the shoulders of his shirt. ‘They tear these off me. Really. Come, I’ll show you what I mean.’ Herr Trütsch was acting as tour leader for a group of women going on a special trip to New York and we were about to enter coach to visit them.
Fortunately, airplane etiquette decreed a modicum of restraint—no one tried to remove any epaulets—but the minute we parted the curtain his adoring fans swarmed, swooped, and stampeded until we took our leave.
‘See? What did I tell you? Now do you understand why it’s been such a pleasure to share your company?’ Listening to his stories and having him listen with evident interest to mine was a once-in-a-lifetime finale to my first major European assignment.” — susgaert
God Was His Co-Pilot
“Several years ago I was traveling to a location to teach. Among other things, as a paramedic, I instruct emergency medical dispatch courses to 9-1-1 dispatchers. I took my seat on the plane and began one of my favorite hobbies, people-watching. Looking at the remaining passengers boarding the plane. An impressive-looking gentleman came on board. Black fur hat, floor-length black robe, long grey beard, and a beautiful carved wood cross on a neck chain. As I thought how cool it would be if he sat next to me, he did. We smiled and said hello to each other. After he was settled in, I commented how beautiful the wooden cross was that he was wearing. That started our conversation which lasted most of the flight. I told him of my many years in emergency services and the places I had traveled. And I told him of my passion for documenting and photographing old historic cemeteries. He then told me the fascinating story of his life as a Russian Orthodox priest. He told me of his years in Russia as a young boy, always wanting to be a priest. He told me of his years of training and becoming a priest in his hometown. After several years, he had advanced in the priesthood and was on his way to open a new church and become the parish priest in the city we were traveling to. During his years as a priest he had studied many languages including English, which was very good, but still with a wonderful Eastern European accent. The plane landed, we stood up, and he looked at the paramedic patch on my jacket and said, ‘I felt a little safer with you on this flight.’ I looked at him and the cross and said, ‘I felt safer on this flight because you were on it, too.’” — dhabben
A Bakery to Remember
“On our flight to the Virgin Islands for a family vacation, my mom sat next to a woman who lived on the island of St. Thomas. She was very kind and outgoing, and spent a good amount of time talking with my mom. As they were talking, the woman mentioned that she loved to cook and owned a bakery. When she asked my mom where we were staying, my mom told her about the family-run hotel we had discovered online. The woman told us that it was a nice place, and not too far from her bakery! Although we would be spending most of our time on the island of St. John, my mom promised we would visit her bakery during our last few days on St. Thomas.
After a lovely few days on St. John, we took a boat back to St. Thomas to spend a day or two on the island. Our last night there, we pulled up the address the woman had written down and walked around the neighborhood to find her bakery. Although we had walked through that area earlier, our path to the place took us down some residential side streets that we hadn’t been on before. When we got to the address, we found it to be a small house that fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. When we walked up to the door, we knocked and found the woman inside. She was so excited to see us! The place was her own home, but she ran a bakery out of her front room. On the wall were pictures of her family, and she pointed out her children that she had mentioned to my mom on the plane. I honestly can’t remember if we paid for it or if the woman insisted we take it for free, but she gave us one of her specialty ‘rainbow cakes’ to take with us. Each layer was a different color, and it was delicious! It was such a nice experience, and I wish I remembered the woman’s name. I hope she’s doing well and still making delicious cakes!” — beckt
The Kindness of Scottish Newlyweds
“My mother had just passed away. I was on the last of my many flights to Phoenix from Los Angeles, and I was a mess. A couple from Scotland sat next to me. They were supposed to be on their way to Vegas. American Airlines screwed up their flight. They were upset, but the man, Jim, and I connected instantly. Though I only understood about 1/3 of what was said because of that thick lovely accent, we started talking non-stop. We laughed a much-needed laugh for an hour and a half. I think my mom sent them. At the end we swapped information and a few weeks later, they sent me a picture of their wedding in Vegas. Adorable.
About a month after that, Jim sent me an email that said they received some flight coupons they received from American Airlines and wanted me to have them. They sent me $600 worth of flight coupons.
What did I do with these you may ask? I immediately got a flight to go visit them in Scotland. I left a year later, the day my mom passed and flew home on her birthday. The Scots and I are now very close friends and I will be taking a second trip this year to see them again. My advice to people: take your earbuds out and have a conversation. You never know what amazing people can come into your life.” — thesunbag
Friends of Inconvenience
“My husband and I were on our way from Austin to New Orleans, where we planned to get married. There was bad weather in the area, and we had to land in San Antonio. Then they sent us to Houston. If we didn’t make it to New Orleans on Friday, we wouldn’t be able to get the marriage license in time to get married Saturday, which was Halloween. We decided to rent a car and drive from Houston. While we were sitting in the airport, I noticed two young ladies from England, who were on our flight, and also trying to get to New Orleans. We decided to ask them if they would like to share a rental car with us. They said yes, so we started driving, unfortunately right along with the storm. Eventually, we were tired, and the storm was pretty bad, so we stopped and shared a hotel room, got a few hours sleep, then had breakfast. We realized it was getting too late to make it all the way to New Orleans and get our marriage license, so we stopped in Lafayette to get the paperwork. Then we drove the rest of the way to New Orleans. We kept in touch for the weekend by text and Facebook. I always hoped the four of us would meet again, but a few years ago, one of the girls passed away. I might actually get a chance to meet her mother in Scotland this fall. Every year on our anniversary, I think of the girls and message the surviving one, in memory of our shared adventure. <3” — leahkorn
Way, way out in the Nevada desert, there's a perfect house for the posh recluse in your life.
The sprawling compound known as the Hard Luck Mine Castle may be comfortable, but it is not for the faint of heart. But if you’re flush with cash and itching to ditch the noise, building restrictions, and nosy neighbors of civilization, maybe you’d like to be its next owner.
Deep in the Nevada desert, in the unincorporated community of Goldfield, Esmeralda County, the 22-room home looks like a citadel of concrete, glass, and steel. It sits on 40 acres of private land, and the beige, rocky views seem to stretch on forever, occasionally punctuated by a shaggy Joshua Tree or ambling coyote.
That rugged remoteness appealed to the current owner, Randy Johnston, who built the place from the ground up between 2000 and 2012. When he arrived from Lake Tahoe nearly 20 years ago, “There was nothing there,” he says. “It was just an old miner’s cabin.”
The area is full of them, because Goldfield was once a place of promise and long-odds hope. In 1908, the Reno Gazette-Journal had a whole section devoted to mining conditions, and reported “big dividends” from the area. “Everyone in the East is talking about Nevada,” one muckety-muck brokerage expert told the paper the prior year. “Capitalists and investors” on the other side of the nation were squinting into the distance, the paper reported, because mines had captured their attention and put dollar signs in their eyes. By 1912, Edward Ryan, Nevada’s State Inspector of Mines, recorded more than 20 operations with postal addresses in Goldfield. But, as one might expect, many of these outfits went bust, and by the time Johnston first passed through in the late 1980s, on a trip to Death Valley, he found an empty cabin just sitting there. Entranced, he stopped by again and again, he says, fixing it up a little bit at a time.
The cabin itself is still there and—once Johnston graded some roads—then came the castle. Inside the 16-inch-thick walls, he installed two kitchens, three bathrooms, a woodshop, a theater, a large fountain, and two pipe organs. A solarium and patio offer sweeping views of the scrubby landscape. The whole thing runs on solar arrays and wind power, plus diesel and propane generators. A smattering of other structures surround the castle, too, including a guest trailer, workshop, and shower house with modern plumbing. There's also a rain catchment system and enough space to stockpile 4,000 gallons of water.
The castle’s interior looks cushy, but any future steward of the off-grid compound must be plucky and sure-footed. “You have to keep the solar running if something goes wrong, get the fuel for the generators for the backup,” Johnston says. “It’s like being on a farm—there are chores you have to do to keep the place running.” You also have to take care to not tumble down the mine shaft that sits about 100 feet from the house. It's been abandoned for decades, but the titular Hard Luck Mine still drops some 160 feet down.
The home’s next custodian should also probably be comfortable with solitude and long car rides. “It’s 50 miles to the nearest town, nearest anything,” Johnston says. There are no gas stations, no grocery stores, and no medical offices. The other day, Johnston drove 125 miles to visit a dentist. His weekly bingo game at a seniors’ center eats up several hours, too.
Hassles aside, Johnston thinks the place might have some appeal as a bed and breakfast—or for an owner who likes room to roam. “There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles of dirt roads to go run around on,” he says. “You can go out and do whatever you want.”
Once he offloads the house—$850,000 is the asking price—Johnston is hitting the road. He plans to drive a trailer across the country, breezing through the Dakotas and visiting friends in Oklahoma. “I’m 73, and I’m ready for another adventure,” he says. Whoever buys the castle is in for one, too.
You never know what you'll find when you turn over a rock.
While exploring methane cold seeps less than 50 miles off the North Carolina coast, scientists found themselves staring at an unexpected invertebrate from the deep sea, with neither eyes nor digestive system. While this sounds like the premise of a very cheesy 1970s sci-fi film, the recent discovery of chemosynthetic vestimentiferan tube worms for the first time in this part of the Atlantic is no fiction.
A team of researchers working with the DEEP Sea Exploration to Advance Research on Coral/Canyon/Cold seep Habitats (DEEP SEARCH) program, were examining the Pea Island and Kitty Hawk methane cold seeps in April when they made the discovery. A remotely operated vehicle nicknamed Jason was removingpieces of rock for the scientists to study later when the tube worm popped suddenly out of a crevice. “My first response was I was absolutely thrilled,” says Amanda Demopoulos, U.S. Geological Survey ecologist and lead scientist on the expedition. “I’ve basically been on the lookout for these tube worms since I started working on U.S. Atlantic seeps since 2012.” These types of worms are found in the Gulf of Mexico, Carribean, and near Barbados, among other places, usually associated with hydrothermal vents. But they have never been spotted along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, or near the U.S. East Coast.
The next day the team ventured to another seep north of the original discovery. Demopoulos told the scientists on board to think about when they were children, turning over rocks in the woods to reveal hidden ecosystems. The spirit of discovery paid off: more worms.
Vestimentiferan tube worms live inside protective tubes and spend their entire existence attached to the ocean floor. What makes them unusual is the way they obtain food. As vestimentiferan worms undergo metamorphosis, their digestive tract disappears and chemosynthesis becomes the only way they obtain nutrients. The process is similar to photosynthesis, but instead of sunlight, the worms use a symbiotic relationship with bacteria to create sustenance from hydrogen sulfide. Chemosynthesis is the base of the food web in some parts of the deepest, darkest abyss, where sunlight might as well be a myth.
These seep ecosystems, it turns out, are hotbeds of biodiversity in the deep sea. According to Demopoulos, the team has found rocks covered in bacterial mats, and mussel beds that “extend forever, as far as the eye can see.” However, the tube worms were a missing piece, and an important one. The presence of these invertebrates can serve as a measure of oceanic environmental conditions. “Overall it provides a window into our understanding of these deep-sea environments, which are relatively mysterious,” says Demopoulos.
Slovenia's most celebrated restaurants rely on their foraging.
His name, believe it or not, is Peter Rabbit. That’s the direct translation of Peter Zajc who, with his business partner Dr. Katja Rebolj, is the leading herb hunter in Slovenia. The two receive commissions from the country’s top chefs to forage for edible plants, herbs, and flowers. Ingredient lists in hand, they range through gnarled primal forests and remote mountain plateaus in search of this unusual quarry.
On the day I accompany Zajc and Rebolj, it’s ideal weather for a stroll in the forest. The sun is sending bolts of light through the canopy, and the fairytale atmosphere of Trzin, a town ten minutes north of Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, is accentuated by their decision to meet me behind a castle. Slovenia is speckled with picturesque castles (my adopted hometown of Kamnik has three right in the center), and this one, Jable Castle, is a beauty worthy of a Disney princess.
It’s a weekday morning, but for Zajc and Rebolj, gliding through this pristine forest is their workday. While many chefs simply ask Zajc and Rebolj for a box of whatever is best at the given moment, others request more exotic targets. Today, we are “hunting” for apple blossoms, ramson leaves and buds, wood sorrel, chickweed, bittercress, burdock, and a handful of other plants that my Slovene-English dictionary failed to assist in translating.
Part of the problem—or the charm, depending on your point of view—is that, as Rebolj says, “There’s a Slovenian saying that there are 10 names for every plant.” One of the highlights of today’s forage is called either smrdljivka (which might translate as “the stinky one”) or krompirjevka (which might be “the potato-y one”) or gozdni regrat (“forest dandelion green”). It smells like raw potato and is delicious when cooked with—as the scent indicates—potato.
But it’s not all fun and games—this is deadly serious work. Every year, there are fatalities when amateur foragers gather colchicum autumnale (also known as autumn crocus, meadow saffron, or—and I’m not making this up—naked ladies) when they think they’ve collected allium ursinum (ramson or wild garlic, čemaž in Slovene). Ramson’s green leaves pack a garlicky punch and, Zajc tells me, sautéing its buds is a popular trend in Slovenia right now. But similar-looking naked ladies are poisonous, and just one leaf accidentally mixed into wild garlic pesto can kill.
Wild garlic, though, likefugu, the delicious bit of the blowfish that happens to be near the toxic bit, is worth the risk. Pungent and intensely green, like the strongest but smoothest garlic imaginable, it must be used in small quantities. I once made the mistake of thinking a jar labelled “čemaž pesto” could be used like normal pesto, just poured over cooked pasta. It tasted so garlic-tastic that my eyes watered. The apartment was garlic-scented for days, and my wife forbade the use of čemaž in closed spaces. It’s delicious and, well, potent.
So, I’m glad I’m in good hands, with Zajc and Rebolj shooting off the trail to scoop up handfuls of what looks to me like a lawn in need of mowing. Zajc giggles with delight each time, kneeling to cradle plants in his hand and treat shoots of wild garlic like baby starlings. He is just as adorable as his “Peter Rabbit” name suggests.
After several hours of walking and foraging, we meet up with Janez Bratovž, Slovenia’s leading chef, in a lovely suburban garden behind a ramshackle farmhouse. Known to all as JB, which is also the name of his eponymous restaurant in Ljubljana, he is the godfather of Slovenian fine dining and a regular on lists of the Top 100 world restaurants. For his latest cookbook which, full disclosure, I assisted in the writing, he crisscrossed the country in search of the best ingredients and the finest producers. And when it comes to foraging, Bratovž relies on Zajc and Rebolj for all his needs.
“They’ll bring plants and herbs even I’ve never heard of, and they know the chemistry of all they bring, so they’ll know exactly how best to use it,” he says. “Not just the traditional way grandmothers would cook with these ingredients, but also down to a science, what flavors will resonate well with exactly what is on my menu.”
Zajc and Rebolj have an encyclopedic knowledge of floral life here in the Alps—a powerful combination of folk knowledge and formal education. Zajc recalls how excited he was as a child to wake early and forage for wild herbs with his parents, a special bonding time for them, the way some children might play ball or watch movies. His childlike joy for the hunt is an ideal complement to Dr. Rebolj’s formal training as a biologist with a doctorate. But both draw from both fonts of knowledge. Rebolj also went on childhood expeditions through the forest, and her family kitchen was lined with glass jars of drying herbs, like an alchemist’s cupboard. Yet both can rattle off the binomial nomenclature of each plant we see, switching to Latin names when our combined knowledge of Slovenian and English fails us. They also describe the chemical composition of various greens, linking this with complementary flavors.
In the garden, Rebolj is wandering barefoot, as she likes to feel the growths beneath her feet and the grass between her toes. She and Zajc talk eagerly about this herb garden and the wild fringes of a grass meadow, while Bratovž bends over and picks what looks like grass, or perhaps a weed. To me, it looks like lunch for goats; to him, it just looks like lunch. He has a habit of feeding me things torn from the ground that I would wholly ignore, much less consider a potential ingredient. The world is his cupboard, and these lawn clippings will end up on the high-end plates of his Michelin-worthy restaurant.
These picturesque fields of wild alpine grasses and flowers that stretch throughout the northern region of Slovenia are, to a great degree, edible, but finding some ingredients really requires searching. Rebolj and Zajc’s expeditions can take them high into the mountains, require hours of hiking, and are by no means a stroll in a field. They mention certain hard-to-access “holy grails” for foragers, including burdock, which you have to dig up carefully, as the desirable roots are below ground, and zlati koren, white asphodel, which primarily grows on alpine meadows. Others are hyper-seasonal, such as the wild garlic buds that are available for a window of mere weeks.
For chefs like JB, these foraged foods open up new possibilities and inspirations, but are also a link to a deep tradition of how people eat in the area, JB included. He grew up in a family so poor that a fried egg on a Sunday morning was the greatest treat imaginable. Limited income meant that foraged foods, provided by the forests and mountain plains were a staple, a necessity, and a delight. Thus there’s a Proustian vibe for Slovenians when they eat foraged foods.
It is fascinating to see how JB transforms information from Rebolj and Zajc into recipes. His wild flora mayonnaise, for instance, is made of regrat (dandelion greens), tropotce (plantago), and travne bilke (various meadow grasses), placed into a blender with a stream of good olive oil, then sieved. Deteljica, clover, found in the forests, has a vinegar-y taste. Tropelium kapucinka, tropaeolum, a beautiful butter-yellow flower, has a powerful taste that JB uses to offset a good steak or corn soup. Tropotec, plantago, is nicknamed “vegetarian cracklings,” as it tastes like pork skin when fried. Kislica, wood sorrel, has a pleasant sour taste, and while most chefs would use the stalks, JB likes to prepare the roots. He is like a kid in a candy store, but the candy here is free and supremely healthy. He is quick to mention, though, that no chef can be great without the best possible ingredients, and chefs do not have time to forage themselves. This means that he is reliant on trustworthy sources, like Zajc and Rebolj—indeed, there is a chapter about them in his latest cookbook.
Their acumen has attracted attention beyond Slovenia, too. As Rebolj leads me through wooded trails that wind in the wake of a castle, she casually mentions that, just a few weeks back, she was filming an episode of a forthcoming Netflix show, Restaurants on the Edge, in these same forests.
Despite this acclaim, the dynamic foraging duo represent Slovenia in miniature—they are the apex of a national culture. On weekends, the woods fill with porcini-mushroom hunters, and just about every family has a member who gathers alpine flowers to prepare their version of planinski čaj, or “mountain tea,” with as many as 30 ingredients. So many Slovenians hike that restaurants can be found atop mountains that are almost inaccessible by car.
Slovenia is one of the most compact, yet geographically diverse, countries in the world, with alpine summits just an hour from the Mediterranean coast, and with karst wine country not far from the Pannonian plain. This means that a rich variety of flora can be found in a modest acreage—a fact that helps explain the long tradition of hand-gathering ingredients that Rebolj and Zajc inherited from elders, who taught them how to distinguish wild garlic from naked ladies. The largest supermarket chain in the country, Mercator, has a slogan that translates as “your best neighbor,” a hand-me-down from the tradition that all you ate was what you grew, foraged, or traded with your neighbors. From the walnuts that fill the national cake, potica, to the buckwheat breads, from porcini-mushroom soup to dandelion-green salad and wild-garlic pesto, the national cuisine is built on hyper-local ingredients. That may be a la mode in culinary capitals these days, but it has always been key to the Slovenian kitchen.
Michael Johnston had just taken his boss’s dogs for a swim in the Kyeburn River in Otago, New Zealand, when he noticed something unusually prehistoric: Enormous, three-toed footprints almost a foot wide speckled the riverbed. Though Johnston didn’t know it at the time, he had just discovered footprints from a moa, a gigantic flightless bird that roamed New Zealand until their extinction in the 1300s. And these aren’t just any ordinary moa tracks. Researchers believe the prints are the first ever found on New Zealand’s South Island and could be up to 12 million years old, according to ABC News.
When Johnston spotted five footprints in the clay bank in March 2019, he reached out to the local Otago Museum, according to TVNZ.com. Kane Fleury, a natural science assistant curator at the museum, was stunned to see Johnston’s pictures, which clearly revealed the perfectly preserved footprints. A few days later, Fleury drove down to meet Johnston at the river, threw on a snorkel and wetsuit, and dove down to see the prints for himself. Once underwater, Fleury discovered two more prints hidden under gravel, for a total of seven astonishingly well-preserved tracks.
After seeking permission from local iwi—one of the tribes within the indigenous Māori community—the museum experts began the excavation, according to a press release from the Otago Museum. Fleury believes that a major flood from November 2018 caused the bank to erode, thus revealing the footprints. Because the prints were submerged under a meter of water, the experts had to temporarily divert the river’s flow in order to chisel out the prints one by one from the clay. Ian Griffin, the director of the Otago Museum, captured a time-lapse of the excavation, which you can watch here.
After all the footprints are extracted and transported to the museum, researchers will begin the long process of drying each hunk of clay to ensure the substrate remains stable enough to prevent any damage to the prints. After this conservation treatment, the prints will go on display.
Moas resembled enormous, fluffy emus, standing over 12 feet tall and weighing over 500 pounds, until they were hunted to extinction. So their footprints, like those of any extinct animal, are quite rare. Until now, scientists had only preserved 25 footprints from the giant bird, according to the museum’s statement. Most moa bones known to science are around 12,000 years old, so these newly discovered tracks are exceptional for their age. “It makes you wonder how many other moa prints are buried or destroyed, or no one knows they're there,” Mike Dickison, the world’s foremost moa expert, told The New Zealand Herald.
Meanwhile, Johnston continues his work driving tractors in the nearby town of Ranfurly. But as he told The Herald, he plans to “walk around the hills with wide open eyes” in case any other fossils choose to reveal themselves to him or his dogs.
Sixteen years of research have revealed the secrets of a major excavation.
Though it took a little while to fully establish itself, Christianity had been percolating in Britain since the second century at the latest, imported by merchants from all around the Roman Empire. King Saeberht over in Essex really helped make it a thing when, in the late sixth or early seventh century, he became the first East Saxon king to convert to Christianity. A medieval legend later took hold claiming that Saeberht had even founded Westminster Abbey and was buried there, though more contemporary scholarship has cast those claims into doubt.
Those pining for proof of a Christian burial from Saeberht’s day, however, are in luck. Live Science reports that researchers have now identified what they believe to be England’s earliest known Christian burial, at a tomb near Prittlewell in Essex County. The tomb was first discovered in 2003, but it was mired in more than a millennium’s worth of earthen crust, which blocked researchers from performing a properly detailed assessment. In this absence of evidence, there was even some speculation that the tomb may have been Saeberht’s own, but now we know better: It predates his death by anywhere from about 10 to 35 years, with researchers dating the tomb to between the years 580 and 605.
It’s quite possible, however, that the tomb belonged to one of the king’s relatives—perhaps even a prince—as the tomb’s contents indicate that the individual was of wealthy and noble status. (All that’s left of the body is some tooth enamel, which tells us only that the individual was older than six when buried.) Researchers were also able to identify the individual as male based on the presence of weapons and a triangular, gold belt buckle within the tomb. They could identify him as Christian, finally, by the two gold-foil crosses by the head of the coffin, where they likely rested over the man’s eyes.
Other marquee findings include a sword, shield, spears, and an arrow, stones from India that attest to the vast networks of trade already established at the time, and remnants of a folding stool that may have been a “gifstol,” from which rulers bestowed gifts or heard disputes. The most exciting relic, however, may be the remains of a lyre, a kind of stringed instrument popular throughout the ancient world. While most of the instrument has decayed, it left traces in the ground that outlined its full shape, and which researchers could sample to determine that the instrument was made of maple. According to a press release from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), “this is the first time the complete form of an Anglo-Saxon lyre has been recorded.”
Objects from the burial are now on display, for the first time, at the Southend Central Museum in Essex, but you don’t have to visit the museum to poke around the findings. They can be explored on a new interactive website created by MOLA, which will also spare you the crusty residue.
A 19th-century infographic that stacks a redwood against St. Peter's Basilica.
Eduard Mielck was a big fan of enormous plants. He worked as a forestry official in Holstein, Germany, and in 1863 published a volume titled Die Riesen der Pflanzenwelt, or The Giants of the Plant World, which compiled measurements and dreamy illustrations of some of the most soaring living organisms known at the time.
Just how big is “giant”? It’s hard to understand height without a reference point—something familiar that sticks in the mind’s eye. Mielck understood this need for scale, and filled his book with illustrations that offer fresh perspectives on massive living things that relatively few would ever be able to see in person.
His images often included humans, humbled and awestruck, heads craned back to survey a swooping canopy. A man and his canine pal nearly vanish next to a grand oak from a forest near Oldenburg. Mielck illustrated the ancient, expansive Hundred Horse Chestnut in Sicily, with heartwood so hollow that several people could shelter inside the trunk, and a canopy big enough to have purportedly shaded 100 knights. A camel’s humps are barely distinguishable beside the undulating roots of a baobab tree in Senegal, and it would take a slew of people to form a ring around the Árbol del Tule, a monumental cypress tree near Oaxaca, Mexico, that ranks among the thickest in the world.
Then again, even modestly large trees dwarf people, dogs, and camels, so to really drive home the idea of enormity, Mielck created a chart that compares some especially towering trees to some famously big buildings.
On a single plate, Mielck planted an imaginary forest where sequoias sprout near palm trees and cypresses, and iconic spires poke up behind their canopies. He called it “Die Riesen der Pflanzenwelt und die Riesengebilde der Baukunst,” or “The Giants of the Plant World and the Giant Structures of Architecture.” The chart is illustrative, if not always a clearly literal accounting of the real world.
On Mielck’s chart, the sequoia—labeled "ein Mammutbaum in Kalifornien"—is the tallest tree, just slightly shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza. In the real world, the pyramid is taller by a wide margin—the tallest sequoias grow to around 275 feet, while the pyramid is around 455 feet—so the closeness in height is either a creative liberty or a trick of perspective. The same goes for the 448-foot-tall dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
The math doesn’t always work out. The Luxor Obelisk in Paris, which is around 75 feet tall, could easily be surpassed by a Lebanese cedar, which can exceed 100 feet. On the chart, Mielck placed them next to each other, with the obelisk a hair taller. But the spirit comes through clearly—some trees are leggy, others squat, and many are really, really tall.
The chart is an example of the 19th-century fascination with quantifying the natural world and stacking up its wonders against one another—and against human accomplishment. That century, which saw a boom in precise measurement of natural features, also saw cartographers plotting imaginary landscapes of the world’s longest rivers winding in parallel or the planet’s tallest peaks sharing a single range. Mielck's trees sprout on several continents, so they’d never be neighbors, and they wouldn't share space with a crowded urban landscape. Still, it’s fun to imagine some of the planet’s most superlative specimens—natural and otherwise—all lined up in a row.
On May 18, a team of renegade cheesemakers will showcase some very outré cheese at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Food: Bigger than the Plate. No samplings of this cheese, which will be showcased in climate-controlled glass, shall be on offer. Which is just as well, since they have been made with bacteria from the bodies of British celebrities.
Alex James of the rock band Blur, Michelin-star chef Heston Blumenthal, former Great British Bake Off finalist and author Ruby Tandoh, the singer-songwriter Suggs, and the rapper Professor Green all volunteered their bodily bacteria for science. More specifically, a chef, a synthetic biologist, and a biodesigner turned their body swabs into starter culture for the five cheeses that make up the exhibit, named Selfmade.
Helene Steiner and Thomas Meany are the team behind Open Cell, a biotechnology research hub housed within 45 shipping containers in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Together with chef John Quilter, who goes by Food Busker, the human-cheese artisans have been maturing a cheshire cheese (from Alex Jones), a comté (Heston Blumenthal), a mozzarella (Professor Green), a Stilton (Ruby Tandoh), and a Cheddar (Suggs). All five cheeses are maturing at the Open Cell lab, and will continue to age at the V&A’s Food exhibition, one of 70 exhibits examining various approaches to the future of food through contemporary design, art, and engineering.
The Selfmade team has launched a Youtube series to promote and explain the project, whose first episode aired on May 11, on Food Busker’s channel. In it, Professor Green gamely declares, “I hate cheese, but I’m here to be made into one.”
This isn’t the first attempt by scientists and cheesemakers to turn celebrity yuck into yum. The 2019 Selfmade is a recreation of a 2013 project with the same name. In the first iteration, Christina Agapakis, a synthetic biologist and artist, and Sissel Tolaas, a scientist and “smell specialist,” created cheese from the body bacteria of a handful of volunteers, including the food writer Michael Pollan. The purpose then, as now, was to create a microbial portrait, in cheese, of these non-cheese entities, in order to educate the public about the ubiquitousness of microbes and to challenge cultural queasiness around bacteria.
Bacteria is everywhere, and despite its association with disease and the common cold, it can play productive roles, as in the case of a ripe Stilton, marbled with mold. Our bodies teem with microbes, and research has suggested that the composition of our body’s microbiome can determine such integral facets as our mood, intelligence, and body weight. In a world obsessed with cleanliness, and armed with hand sanitizers, it is worth paying attention to the function of good bacteria. That’s where the cheese comes in. By using human bacteria to make such a beloved edible product, these food scientists and artists want to challenge associations of disgust with bacteria, and to highlight their extraordinary roles in our lives.
If you’ve ever come across a cheese that smelled like feet, that’s because the species of bacteria in many cheeses is of the same composition as the bacteria in human body parts. Cheesemaking calls for adding a starter culture—in the form of bacteria—to milk, which helps cheese curds to form. In the case of the Selfmade cheeses, this bacteria was taken by swabbing the ear, armpit, nose, or belly button of the celebrity volunteers. The microbes were then grown in a lab until there was enough to make wheels of cheese.
Ruby Tandoh, who writes in The Guardian about her experience of being made into Stilton, calls the project a “stubbornly strange, silly, unsterile food antic,” which was nonetheless timely given regulations around certain foods considered unclean or unsafe for eating, such as raw milk and unpasteurized cheeses.
V&A’s Food: Bigger than the Plate opens on May 18 in London and is scheduled to run through October 20, 2019. The Selfmade cheeses are being lab-tested to determine their fitness for consumption, but, ensconced in glass, they are unlikely to tempt museumgoers who might be curious to smell or nibble a cheesy Blumenthal.
For Selfmade’s Youtube videocast, Professor Green tells Food Busker that he specifically chose to be turned into mozzarella because it is the only cheese he can tolerate. He wanted his belly button bacteria taken because he thought it might be funny. “There were other places, but I definitely don’t want that filmed.” Scientific caprice, or delicious caprese, the fate of the Professor’s mozzarella remains to be seen.
Atlas Obscura readers nominate their favorite science fiction-inspired spots around the world.
Hollywood spends countless millions designing fictional futuristic settings, but all over the world there are absolutely real places that seem to have already transcended our times, no special effects needed. These seemingly science fiction-inspired spots have embraced the possibilities of the future to make the present a far more out-there experience than many of us fully appreciate. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about the most sci-fi-esque places they've ever encountered, and the responses were light years ahead of our expectations.
Check out out some of our favorite responses below, and if you have an unforgettable, futuristic place of your own that you'd like to recommend, tell us about it in the forums, and keep the conversation going! Time travel is still a fantasy, but these places bring you the future today.
“It’s old hat now, but the Guggenheim in New York City springs to mind, only because when my parents took me there back in the 1960s, when I was around 9 or 10, I desperately wanted to skate down those ramps.” — lindacantoni
“I visited the Burj Khalifa in Dubai a month ago and thought it was very ‘outer space’ looking! My friends commented on my photos of it that it looked like I was on another planet.” — pennywindfield
“I’m surprised that no one chose this museum in Seattle. The building also houses a music museum. The exterior reeks of science fiction." — alanrogers250
If stones could speak, what would they say? According to one rock in a small village in France, “ROC AR B...DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL.” If those garbled letters mean anything to you, you might find yourself pocketing a few thousand dollars in cold, hard, rock-deciphering reward cash.
The village of Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany, France, has just posted a reward of 2,000 euros ($2,240) for anyone who can translate this very cryptic message on a very mysterious rock, according to Agence France-Presse. The stone in question stands on the outskirts of Plougastel-Daoulas. Most of the day, it lurks submerged by the Atlantic Ocean, revealing itself only at low tide. The stone was first spotted three or four years ago, but the mystery of its etchings has stumped the local academics who attempted to crack the code, CNN reports.
Approximately the size of an average person (whatever that means), the rock is covered on one side with an inscription almost entirely in capital letters, according to AFP. All the letters come from the French alphabet, but their combinations have proved unreadable. “There are people who tell us that it's Basque and others who say it's old Breton,” Dominique Cap, the town’s mayor, told AFP. The rock also boasts two dates, 1786 and 1787, that hint at its age. These years correspond with the years that the town constructed artillery batteries to protect the nearby city of Brest, as Véronique Martin, who is leading the search for a translator, told AFP. The rock also bears a drawing of a sailboat.
Locals frequently compare the rock to one of the world’s most famous mineral mysteries, the Rosetta Stone. The stone, which contains the same decree written in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek, was discovered in Egypt in 1799. It took 23 years before the French scholar Jean-François Champollion cracked the code of the hieroglyphs. Unfortunately for the future of Plougastel-Daoulas’s particular mysterious rock, Champollion could not be reached for comment or translation, having died in Paris in 1832.
As it awaits translation, the boulder at Plougastel-Daoulas joins a cherished clique of untranslatable stones. In Los Lunas, New Mexico, the 80-ton Decalogue Stone bears inscriptions that still stump scientists and have even convinced some that the rock is a hoax. In Berkeley, Massachusetts, the Dighton Rock hosts elaborate petroglyphs that scholars have attributed to the Vikings, Native American communities, and one Portuguese explorer. In Calva, North Carolina, the Judaculla boulder boasts an intricate web of symbols that still elude translation.
Hopefully this French rock’s more recent provenance will assist any would-be code-crackers in their quest. People have until November 30, 2019, to submit their guesses, at which point a jury from the town will decide which translation is most probable and award the prize. When asked to comment on the contest, the mysterious rock said in a statement, “R I OBBIIE: BRISBVILAR ... FROIK … AL.”
It's been known for decades, but recent work showed that it had been painted over after the artist's death.
Art conservators at Dresden’s Staatliche Kunstsammlungen have recently discovered that a famed painting contains more than meets the eye. During a routine round of conservation on Johannes Vermeer’s 17th-century Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, the art detectives realized that a section of the canvas had been painted over after the Dutch artist’s death in 1675, concealing a cupid figure. Conservators are now going to great lengths to restore Vermeer’s work to its original state.
Arthur Wheelock, the former curator of northern Baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is serving as a consultant on the work. He first encountered the painting in 1978, when he was looking at Vermeers under a microscope as research for a book. “We discovered that all sorts of changes occurred,” he says. X-ray images conducted then revealed that a cupid figure (a painting within a painting) was hidden under the bare wall behind the central figure. New work in Dresden, however, showed that the overpainting—previously thought to have been done by Vermeer himself, which is why it was not removed sooner—was actually the work of some unknown hand.
Christoph Schölzel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden’s painting restorer, began working on the canvas in 2017. With the help of infrared reflectography imaging and microscopic analyses, he found that a thick layer of varnish was yellowing the colors beneath it. “The old paint was yellow enough to match the surrounding varnish so we know it was applied sometime after Vermeer applied the varnish,” says Wheelock. After sending the painting off to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts for testing, the conservators were able to determine that the varnish post-dated the artist’s death. So, in 2018, they decided to free the cupid.
To preserve the delicate paint and original varnish layer, Schölzel is painstakingly removing the top layer with a scalpel, as opposed to a solvent, which could eat away at Vermeer’s earlier work. To date, the cupid is about half revealed, and Wheelock estimates it will be another year before the figure is fully exposed. The museum has decided to leave the painting on display during the conservation work so that visitors can see the process unfold.
Vermeer painted Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window between 1657 and 1659, and it was gifted to the city of Dresden in 1742. Wheelock believes that the cupid was concealed some time between these dates. Vermeer’s work was relatively unknown at the time, and often attributed to more popular painters, such as Rembrandt. “I’m wondering if the cupid might have been a very uncharacteristic Rembrandt component, so someone said ‘Cover that cupid up,’” Wheelock says.
The changes affect both the aesthetics and meaning of the work. With the cupid figure now partially revealed, Vermeer’s intention to have the painting be a meditation on love has become more obvious. After all, the letter the girl is reading has long been thought to be a mash note. Wheelock is excited about the vividness that has long been lurking beneath the surface. “The incredible sense of light and color and touch had been revealed by the varnish—which has been on there for centuries—and you now have amazing light features that had been suppressed,” he says. “To see Vermeer’s light effects coming back and looking slightly different now with this restoration … that’s what is exciting to me.”
This rare reveal is exciting and suspenseful for the art professionals conducting the work. “In this case, because it’s such a radical new visual experience, most of us working on it are wondering what it is going to be like to fully see that cupid behind the woman’s head,” says Wheelock. “We’re still exploring a lot.”
The discovery of "bomb carbon" miles below the surface shows how deep human impact goes.
As it turns out, indiscriminately detonating nuclear bombs across the globe, some 500 times or more stronger than those dropped during World War II, can have a pretty profound effect on the world. Evidence of Cold War nuclear testing has made its way to the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean.
Scientists recently discovered evidence of radioactive carbon, also known as “bomb carbon,” in the tissues of crustaceans—up to seven miles below the surface, in iconic trenches such as the Mariana, Mussau, and New Britain, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Bomb carbon, known as carbon-14, can form naturally in the atmosphere and within some organisms, but during the nuclear arms race its atmospheric levels skyrocketed. These particles descended into the ocean, where they were absorbed by marine animals near the surface. Decaying remains of those surface animals sank to the bottom, where crustaceans called amphipods then consumed them, incorporating the bomb carbon into their own bodies.
Perhaps even more significant than the discovery of bomb carbon itself is how quickly the isotope reached the bottom. According to researchers, water containing carbon-14 can take centuries to circulate throughout the ocean, but the food web drastically accelerated the process. “There’s a very strong interaction between the surface and the bottom, in terms of biologic systems, and human activities can affect the biosystems even down to 11,000 meters,” said Weidong Sun, a coauthor of the study, via press release, “so we need to be careful about our future behaviors.”
These deep-sea crustaceans are longer-lived than their shallow-water relatives, which contributes to the accumulation of carbon-14 in their tissues. This can become problematic, according to a statement by Ning Wang, a geochemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study. “Besides the fact that material mostly comes from the surface, the age-related bioaccumulation also increases these pollutant concentrations, bringing more threat to these most remote ecosystems.” Researchers hope to gain a better understanding of the extent of human pollution in the most inaccessible locations—even if there’s little we can do about it now.
Karen Parker kept finding weird stuff. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2014, and Parker—who lives and works inland, in Florida’s Lake City—was visiting Bald Point State Park, where Ochlockonee and Apalachee Bays mingle. The conservation area on the Gulf Coast, south of Tallahassee, is known for its marshes and pale beaches, where grass tufts up from below and bald eagles glide overhead.
On the shore, Parker was seeing things she couldn’t quite figure out. There were hundreds of little, purple, pimpled objects that looked like earlobes, or maybe tiny kidneys. And then there were … what, exactly? Something that looked like a blood clot half-smothered by sand. Something else resembling a squashed breast implant. A scrap of rubber, maybe, that had sprouted lime-green fur.
As a regional public information coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), Parker is no stranger to people’s questions about things that wash ashore. But these had her stumped. She picked up a stick and started to poke them, and then began snapping photos to send to her colleagues. “I was on the beach texting folks, going, ‘What the heck is this?’” Parker says.
She didn’t hear back right away, but ended up answering the question herself at the nearby Gulf Specimen Marine Lab Aquarium. Photos above the touch tank identified the purple lobes as sea pansies (related to corals), and the other strange things as “sea pork.” The term can refer to several species of tunicates, including Aplidium californicum,Aplidium solidum, and Aplidium stellatum—invertebrates that have been siphoning, filtering, and squirting water for hundreds of millions of years. Many of these creatures are composed of colonies of organisms called zooids, nestled together in a gloopy “tunic.” This sheath is made partly of cellulose, and functions as a sort of gelatinous exoskeleton, like strong, squishy armor. Sea pork can be bologna-pink, purple as bloody liver, or the creamy beige of roast turkey. The name is said to come from the fact that dead tunicates sometimes resemble slabs of glistening fat.
Mystery solved, Parker zipped back to the beach to take more photos—“as many as we possibly could”—to post on the FWC Facebook page. When they went live, some commenters weighed in to say that they had already heard of sea pork, but others had been similarly puzzled by blobs on the beach. Some wrote, “Oh, that’s what that weird thing was,” Parker recalls.
Sea pork has been confusing beachgoers for generations, and scientists and others have spent well over a century trying to correct misconceptions about it. It’s not surprising that the creatures spark dark imaginings: In death, they look like bloated cutlets or waterlogged livers, so it’s easy to wonder whether unfortunate body parts are bobbing in the waves. Onlookers have also mistaken them for tar balls from an offshore oil spill.
In June and July 1892, several U.S. newspapers syndicated a column by noted author Mary E. Bamford that tried a novel tactic—allowing a misunderstood specimen to speak on its own behalf. “I am one of those creatures myself,” the surprisingly articulate narrator declared. “Our name is ‘Tunicates’ because we are covered by a kind of leathery tunic or coat. Some people call us ‘Ascidians,’ which is a very good name to describe us by, for it comes from an old Greek word that means a ‘skin bottle.’” (Keeping with the organ theme, the etymology points to the same root as the Greek word for "bladder.") The approach was clever, but it didn’t do much for sea pork’s reputation. In the 21st century, the creatures are still dodging insults: The Tampa Bay Times, for instance, once referred to sea pork as “maybe the grossest” thing you could find on the beach.
Beached sea pork is a common sight in west Florida, explains José H. Leal, the science director of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, in Sanibel. Though various species of sea pork are found in Tanzania and Australia, as well and along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, the western edge of Florida has a few attributes that make it especially likely to host the glistening globs. “You can go for almost the same width as the state offshore in really shallow water until you get to the shelf break where the shelf ends, and get dropped into the very deep sea,” Leal says. “Currents and waves will push a lot of things onto the beach.” That includes sea pork, which often lives on shallow rock or other hard surfaces.
Confused and curious beachcombers sometimes collect the sea pork and bring it to the museum for identification. “Some of them bring it in a plastic ziplock bag and say, ‘I didn’t want to touch it,’” Leal says. It seems most likely to show up in the winter or early spring, Leal adds, when strong winds blow ashore, but hurricanes and tropical storms fling them up, too, all the way to the Carolinas.
Before you wonder if you’ve stumbled into nature’s free, shoreline butcher shop, remember: It won’t taste like a pork chop. It won’t even have much of a smell, Leal says, just briny, like the sea. Some of sea pork's tunicate cousins are served as delicacies in South Korea, where they're called meongge, but these are farmed, stripped of their outerwear, and served fresh, raw, and rubbery, the Korea Herald reports. If you see some festering on the shore, though, it’s probably best not to take a bite.
The particles have covered nearby beaches, unnoticed, for nearly 75 years.
The American military’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 “was the worst manmade event ever, by far,” according to the geologist Mario Wannier. “You have a city, and a minute later you have no city.” At least 70,000 people were killed by the initial impact; the final death toll, accounting for radiation, could surpass 145,000. Wannier and his colleagues recently stumbled upon tiny remnants of this massive event on the beaches of Japan's Motoujina Peninsula. These glass particles formed out of the explosion, and have resided on nearby beaches ever since. They published their findings this week in the journal Anthropocene.
Wannier had been studying beach debris from different areas in order to compare the health of different marine ecosystems, when some particles from the Motoujina Peninsula struck him as unusual. Next to particles generated by plants or animals, these were “aerodynamic, glassy, rounded”—they reminded him of what he had seen in sediment samples from the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, the geological marker of the mass extinction that erased the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. Research suggests that the mass extinction was triggered by meteorite impact, which would have ejected ground materials into the atmosphere that descended back down as glass.
But these particles from the Motoujina Peninsula were also notably different in several ways from the K-Pg particles: Some were rubbery, others had multi-layered glass shells. The variety reflected the wide range of materials present in the particles, identified under electron microscope at the University of California, Berkeley. That range is just one indication that the particles formed as a result of the Hiroshima bombing. An urban center presents a wider variety of materials—such as concrete, marble, stainless steel, and rubber—than a desert test site like Trinity, in New Mexico, where the first-ever nuclear explosion was tested. The resulting particles from that test, called trinitites, are notably less diverse in their composition than what Wannier and his colleagues are now calling “Hiroshimaites.” The presence of anorthite and mullite crystals in the particles, meanwhile, suggested that they had formed in temperatures hotter than 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,800 degrees Celsius.
While even this cannot capture the scale of the destruction, the researchers estimate that there are between 2,200 and 3,100 metric tons of the particles per square kilometer of the beach area (if the sand is measured from the surface and down to four inches below). Wannier says that this is the first time that they have been studied in detail since the bombing took place nearly 75 years ago.
Used in traditional medicine, caterpillar fungus is pricey, potent, and increasingly scarce.
Growing up in rural Tibet in the early 2000s, Nlang Mao Tso spent her childhood summers trudging along mountainsides, searching the ground with a tiny pickaxe in hand. When she found treasure—caterpillar fungus—she placed it in an instant noodle cup.
Caterpillar fungus, also called cordyceps or even the "zombie mushroom," is unusual in that it propagates itself by infecting one specific insect: the ghost moth caterpillar. Upon entering its gut, the mushroom slowly kills the caterpillar, then “mummifies” its body, until there is nothing left a but a long, tube-like mushroom. Finally, a stalk bursts out of the caterpillar’s head, ready to infect any other caterpillars in the vicinity, like something out of the Alien movies.
After a day crawling along the mountainside, raking the ground, Nlang Mao Tso could usually expect to bring home at least a few caterpillar mushrooms. It was hard work. But Nlang Mao Tso, who is now a student at Tibet University, has fond memories of a childhood spent collecting. It was a community activity—her whole village would head to the mountain, singing Chinese pop songs and playing pranks on one another as they worked.
Tibet is one of the few places caterpillar fungus grows—the mushroom is found only in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau above 10,000 feet. And in this part of the world, cordyceps fuels an entire economy. Prized across southeast Asia for its medicinal properties, the fungus fetches as much as $30,000 per pound—enough to pay for her education, from schoolbooks to college tuition.
“People can make so much money collecting it that they don’t need to do anything else the rest of the year,” says Kelly Hopping, an ecologist at Boise State University who spent years on the plateau watching the cordyceps collectors at work.
But soon, this all could change: Climate change and decades of overharvesting have made it harder and harder to find the mushrooms, according to a November study by Hopping and two colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In China, the primary consumers of caterpillar fungus, researchers are well aware of this fact. Chinese pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop a workaround: Instead of raking the mountainside for the subtle tubular fungus, why not cultivate it on a large scale in a lab?
Attempts at artificial cultivation began in earnest in the 1990s, spurred by two crucial events. In 1993, Chinese distance runners broke several world records in succession while on a diet regimen purportedly including cordyceps. Demand skyrocketed. Then, in 1999, cordyceps was listed as an “endangered species for protection” by the Chinese government. But it wasn’t until around 2014 that scientists succeeded at growing the mushrooms on a large scale, according to Caihong Dong, a microbiologist who researches cultivation for Sunshine Lake Pharma, one of the companies rushing to perfect the process.
The industry is fiercely competitive. So far, only three labs have succeeded at growing the mushroom indoors, says Dong. And all of those in the race have guarded their methods.
“They are all keeping it a secret,” says Dong, who is also affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “No connection, no communication.”
The process is tricky. Not only do scientists have to get the fungus to infect the caterpillar, they first have to keep both parties alive. And it turns out that caterpillar fungi are quite finicky. They require conditions that mimic the 10,000-foot Tibetan Plateau: very cold temperatures and low oxygen. In the wild, the caterpillars take four to five years to mature enough for the fungus to attack them, though labs have cut that process down to two years. The caterpillars also get sick very easily, according to a review of cultivation breakthroughs published earlier this year in Critical Reviews of Biotechnology. Researchers have to pamper the caterpillars, feeding them on a diet of carrots and special probiotics to boost their immune systems.
After keeping the caterpillar alive for years, the scientists then have to figure out how to get the fungus to kill it. In the wild, only one in 1,000 caterpillars get infected. But Sunshine Lake Pharma in Guangdong, China, has drastically improved those odds. Its two laboratories produce 10 tons of the fungus annually, and after the company finishes building a third, even larger laboratory, it expects to produce 20 percent of the world’s supply of cordyceps.
Chinese researchers have generated a slew of research in recent years purporting to show that the fungus is an effective treatment or cure for myriad conditions, including multiple types of cancer, erectile dysfunction, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and even SARS, the deadly viral respiratory infection that killed 774 people in 2003.
Some Western experts, however, are skeptical of the claims. They note that these studies have been almost entirely carried out in rats and in test tubes—methods that don’t accurately predict the effects of cordyceps on people. The few studies that do involve humans use very small sample sizes, and often aren’t double-blind—people know when they’re getting cordyceps versus a placebo—two factors which can lead to biased results.
Despite the uncertainty about its benefits, the demand for the fungus has been unquenchable—and thus a boon to the Tibetan Plateau, where wild cordyceps collection makes up close to 80 percent of the local income in some areas. But the prospect of mass propagation in labs could soon disrupt livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people.
“Now that they have been successful cultivating cordyceps in the lab, it’s no longer a necessity to harvest,” says Dong, through a translator.
And while artificial cultivation hasn’t had any impact on wild collection so far, there are some signs of discontent on the plateau, Dong adds.
“Local governments in areas of wild cordyceps were not supportive,” she says, “they weren’t trying to oppose, or interfere, but they weren’t enthusiastic.”
Part of the concern is that labs like Dong’s are getting better at producing high-grade mushrooms that are fuller, cleaner and more attractive than most wild varieties. Plus, the labs can produce the mushroom year-round; wild cordyceps only appear in the summer.
Not everyone is alarmed, however. In Bhutan, local cordyceps collectors aren’t concerned because the wild mushrooms have other advantages, according to Kesang Wangchuck, deputy chief research officer at Bhutan’s Renewable Natural Resources Research Center.
“Cordyceps grown in the wild and cultivated cordyceps are different in value,” he says. People believe that nature itself imbues the caterpillars with their purported (if scientifically dubious) ability to cure most illnesses. Although ecologists aren’t sure what ghost moth caterpillars eat, many locals believe it’s the medicinal plants that the insects munch that gives them their healing properties, Wangchuck says; carrots just wouldn't have the same effect.
But the biggest threat to wild cordyceps collection isn’t artificial cultivation. It’s the one-two punch of overharvesting and climate change, according to Boise State’s Hopping.
“It’s a sticky thing—short of thinking of a sustainable way for people to harvest it, it’s a lose-lose situation,” she says.
Nlang Mao Tso has noticed this decline. She remembers when collectors would easily bring home 100 of the mushrooms in one day. Now, they’re lucky to find 20.
A key problem is that consumers prefer mushrooms that haven’t grown spores yet, and therefore haven’t had a chance to reproduce, Hopping says.
She analyzed over 18 years of interviews with cordyceps collectors across the mushroom’s range, and the vast majority of collectors asserted that they saw fewer mushrooms. The collectors blamed overharvesting. However, considering the cordyceps’ extremely specific habitat requirements, and its location in one of the most rapidly warming areas of the world, Hopping thinks it’s likely that climate change is worsening the problem of unsustainable harvest.
It may turn out that artificial cultivation is the only way to fulfill the enormous demand for cordyceps without driving the wild variety to extinction, Sunshine Lake Pharma’s Dong says. Despite the endangered status of the cordyceps, people keep collecting in new areas.
“All [cultivation] has done is make the cordyceps available to more people,” she says. “It’s beneficial to the environment, and it’s beneficial to consumers.”
But how it will impact the collectors, she adds, is still an open question.
Only the very wealthy could afford these delicate contraptions.
In the early-19th century, the advent of the steam locomotive hurtled the world into the future. With crude trains tearing by at speeds breathless for the time (in the tens of miles an hour), journeys of weeks turned into days, and days into hours.
But as the world sped up, people still stopped for cups of coffee. (Or needed it even more to keep pace.) And in the face of train fever, one French-Italian designer combined the bean and the train. In 1861, J.B. Toselli patented a glorious cafetière-locomotive, or "train coffee maker."
Toselli's cafetière-locomotive is decidedly train-shaped, with a smokestack and wheels that actually roll. But no steam engine has ever been made from baby blue or powder-puff pink ceramic, painted with flowery medallions and swooping butterflies.
The coffee world burbled with activity in the mid-19th century, from the eight-foot-tall Loysel coffee machine, which could produce 2,000 cups of coffee an hour, to an early French press, patented in 1852. But Toselli's coffee train was special.
Enrico Maltoni, author of the tome Coffee Makers, writes that "the coffee preparation ritual, no longer banished to the kitchen, became a true moment of domestic theatre." While he notes that train-shaped coffee makers had existed before, made from silver and brass, Toselli made them even more glamorous, with their pastel colors and elegant decoration. Toselli upgraded their inner workings too, with an advanced balance brewing system.
With coffee loaded into the funnel-like smokestack, water in the boiler, and the spirit flame lit beneath the chassis, steam starts whistling out of a tap at the top. But with that tap twisted shut, heated water is forced into the glass pipe connecting the boiler and smokestack. As the coffee and water mix in the front of the train, the contraption shifts forward with the weight, allowing a lid to snuff out the spirit burner. This, Maltoni writes, creates a vacuum effect as the boiler cools, and the coffee is sucked back through the tube, with the grounds left behind via a filter. Then, the coffee is ready to be poured, dispensed through a pipe running beneath the train. With puffs of steam from its safety valve and its rolling wheels, the Toselli cafetière-locomotive added "an undeniable playfulness to coffee time," Maltoni writes.
With the addition of a safety valve, Toselli could market his coffee maker as inexplosible. Both coffee makers and trains at the time had a bad habit of exploding from steam pressure. While trains invariably claimed a higher death toll, mid-century coffee makers were no slouch in the maiming department. One coffee expert, Ian Bersten, called valve-less coffee makers of the time "table-top grenades."
This magical coffee-making toy was never mass produced, and only the wealthiest could afford it. As a result, only a handful exist today. Maltoni, who himself is a renowned coffee-machine collector, with many of his acquisitions on display at Milan's MUMAC, or Museum of Coffee-Making Machines, writes that for most coffee-craving collectors, they are "the object of desire."
The era of leisurely, train-dispensed coffee was unfortunately short, and there's very little whimsy in modern Keurigs and Mr. Coffees. But for the coffee-and-train loving individual with deep pockets, Maltoni himself has a bright pink original Toselli cafetière-locomotive for sale, for a cool €10,000.
Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite enigmatic objects and locales.
Put on your deerstalker cap and get out your magnifying glass (or your smartphone, because it's 2019), it's mystery time! Part of what makes the world such a wondrous place are the unanswered questions associated with many artifacts and historic locations. Whether it's a curious contraption from antiquity, or a grimly fascinating unsolved crime, the mysteries of the world keep us guessing, and many of them are tied places you can visit (even if they still refuse to give up their secrets). We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about the mysteries that fascinate them, and they led us to some truly enigmatic places.
Check out some of our favorite recommendations below, and if you have a mysterious place of your own that you just can't stop thinking about, head over to our Forums and keep the conversation going. True mysteries might not have easy answers, but you don't need to be a detective to be fascinated by where they took place.
“1948—A dead man is found sitting at the beach. He has no wallet, no money, no hat, and the labels are removed from his clothes. He does have a comb, an unused rail ticket, and a scrap of paper ripped from the final page of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. It reads ‘Tamam Shud’, Persian for ‘It is ended.’ The book is later found in the back seat of a parked car. Indentations on the pages show a phone number and encrypted text. The text has never been decoded, the man has never been identified, and every step of the investigation just led to weirder and weirder questions.” — tralfamadore
“It may forever remain a mystery how this single person, singlehandedly and secretly, carried all that heavy coral to build his castle. There was a will and there was a way, we just don’t know it yet (or we may never know).” — CDVV86
“I find this beguiling. Clearly a mystery if for no other reason than its intended purpose. Add to that mystery the estimated age and you’ve got a million more unanswered and potentially unanswerable questions.” — gustae
“The Hinterkaifeck farm murders creep me out. The whole family was brutally murdered (seriously, it was brutal—don’t read about it if you’re squeamish) and in all likelihood the murderer was living hidden somewhere on the property for a few days before the murders. Why did he wait?!” — mmstrick
“A little closer to home for me are the Georgia Guidestones. It’s a huge Stonehenge-like memorial with strange advice for the world in several different languages. Nobody knows who commissioned the monument and, amazingly, no one has ever come forward to admit it was them. Some killjoys suggest it was a hoax perpetrated by the owner of a local marble quarry to drum up business, which, as much as I love a good mystery, makes sense in a way. Because why else put something like this in the middle of nowhere Georgia?” — mmstrick
“I’m very surprised that no one has mentioned the Dyatlov Pass Incident, all the facts about the people just don’t make any sense. Why leave the tent in the middle of the night? Why weren’t they dressed properly? Why a single file line? How’d they get beat up? Sooooo many unsolved questions.” — britnylk
To my right is a grey, frizzy cat. Behind me, a chipmunk wearing a scarf and a lederhosen-esque suit with clovers stands besides a T-shirted gorilla. To the front, a panda and a fox are finishing off their dance routine, about to give way for me and the cat to make our own pirouette entrance. No, I haven’t landed in some alternative version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, I’m participating in a class at Japan’s only mascot prep school.
Choko Group Mascot Actor’s School, the school founded by teacher Choko Ohira in 2005, is located in a small alleyway in the western suburbs of Tokyo. The school is part of the namesake Choko Group, which acts both as a training center for wannabe mascots and those who already have some experience but want to step up their game, and as a talent agency of sorts. Choko Group students are sent out to events ranging from store openings to appearances at zoos, with some going on to become hotshot mascots.
Ohira herself used to be one of them. Part of the children’s program Okaasan to Isshoni (With Mom), shown on Japan’s national broadcaster NHK, she was in the spotlight as the popular mascot mouse Porori for over a decade. After finishing, she decided she wanted to train the next generation of actors. Some of the class participants mentioned that Choko Group is special because its founder is such a prestigious ex-mascot, one that they remember from their own childhoods or raising their children. For them, it’s akin to attending an acting class taught by a famous actor.
Indeed, mascots, or yurukyara, have a rather strong presence in Japan: everything from cities and companies to prisons and the tax office have one. You’ll find them at city events, participating in rallies, dishing out hugs, donning their signature poses, and promoting whatever they’ve been hired to represent. Photo ops are rife, and it’s not just the kids who end up posing with them—yurukyara are a hit with adults too. There is even an annual Yurukyara Grand Prix, which distributes prizes for the most popular mascot, as well as a World Character Summit.
According to Ohira, the mascot craze only started around the early 2000s. That was when municipalities started actively using mascots as a promotion method, and yurukyara really popped into the public eye. Some of them have reached national star status, such as Kumamoto City’s Kumamon (a very cuddly bear), or Funabashi’s Funassyi (a huge pear, a riff on the city’s name as nashi means pear in Japanese). Others barely reach local legend level.
The boom in mascots was such that the government organized a cull to reduce spending on them in 2015, as municipal budgets were used to create and maintain the yurukyara. In Osaka Prefecture, that meant 20 out of a whopping 92 mascots getting booted out. That said, the boom does not seem to stop. The 2018 Yurukyara Grand Prix had “only” 909 Japan-based mascots hoping for the top prize, versus 1,157 the year prior. For perspective, they’re just the ones who participated, not the total tally of mascots in Japan.
But what drives people to become a professional mascot in the first place? Besides wanting to make people smile—a large reason for many—the answer is as varied as the people who join the class. Today’s chipmunk is a woman with grown-up kids who have left the nest, leaving her with more time on her hands. As a result, she’s picked up several volunteering activities, and is trying to learn sign language. Her main goal is to bring people joy by being a mascot, regardless of who they are. There’s a school close to her house for those with hearing impairments, and she’d like to be a mascot for those kids too.
Then there’s the cat, a guy who makes ends meet as a part-time worker and who would like to end up as a mascot in Disneyland or a similar theme park. The gorilla, a man who is a huge baseball fan, dreams of being a mascot for his hometown team.
The panda, a girl who looks to be in her mid-twenties with braces, is clearly the most driven out of everyone here today. She has a grand plan: rather than wanting to be an existing mascot, she’d prefer to create her own, as ‘“that way you can really own all the steps and its character.” Her ultimate goal? To not just perform in Japan, but abroad as well—preferably in other East Asian countries, as they might be more attuned to mascot culture than the rest of the world.
Her dedication is key, as it’s not a simple matter of prancing around in a costume. Companies might just put their new recruits into a mascot suit without any training, but students at Choko Group adhere to strict rules set by the school. These include never letting anyone see you change or showing skin when in costume. Keeping the fantasy alive of it being a flesh-and-blood character, rather than a human in a suit, is of the utmost importance.
For that same reason, no talking is allowed either, unless the student has progressed to the upper echelons of mascot society as the main actor, or is in a generic costume that isn’t tied to one specific yurukyara. If speaking is required, cuteness is key, no matter the actor’s natural tone of voice. Who can wear which costume is specified by height, not gender, so the chance of a cute animal costumes being worn by a man with a deep voice is just as high as it being a high-pitched woman, and there should be no discrepancy in the level of kawaii (cuteness). Other than that, a sunny disposition and a reasonable level of fitness always help. The costumes can be cumbersome, there’s lots of movement involved, and those movements have to look as upbeat as possible.
During class, the costumes facilitate this. After an intense stretching session, we start learning a short choreographed sequence, still wearing regular workout clothes. It’s quite a happy dance, but although everyone is friendly, it’s clear concentration levels are high. The vibe changes as soon as we put on our costumes. Everyone spends a good 30 minutes changing into their chosen animal outfit supplied by the school, with a dazzling array of panda heads, rabbit feet, cat onesies, and more stacked on the shelves lining the back wall. Once the last chinstrap has been adjusted and strand of hair tucked in, everyone seems twice as cheerful and bubbly, while trying to put their best foot or paw forward. Quite miraculous, considering the costume itself is pretty claustrophobic for the uninitiated.
It’s very hot inside my own bunny-in-a-flowery-dress costume, and I have trouble locating the other students, as I can only see through one of my gauze eyes. Even lifting my feet requires a lot of effort, and I find myself shuffling around rather than being able to show off the feather-light steps I practiced. Luckily, the costumes are all cleaned regularly and sprayed with odor neutralizer before putting them back, but I can imagine this being a full workout in Japan’s summer heat. When I mention this, Ohira laughs. “That’s why events with mascots are usually held indoors in summer, where there’s air conditioning.”
Besides this strong dedication to mascot-dom as a craft and profession, what sets Japan’s mascot culture apart is its popularity regardless of age and gender. According to Ohira, this may have something to do with the country’s approach to physical interactions. “Japan is a society that isn’t big on touch; handshakes and hugs aren’t common, instead we bow, or maybe do a small wave,” she says. “But mascots do [hug]. That might be why not just kids but adults too like mascots, as it’s something they can actually touch and feel, which they usually don’t have. The mascots are very open and hug everyone, including the elderly, in a way that you normally wouldn’t do yourself.”
Considering the mascot’s often anthropomorphic form, that isn’t completely surprising; you’re more likely to want to pet a stray animal than hug someone you don’t know.
"It’s not to say that we constantly walk around thinking that we want to be hugged but don’t do it—rather, we just think not doing it is normal, but when you end up being hugged by a mascot, you do get that fuzzy, happy feeling. Similar to stroking a cat, perhaps.”
That feeling isn’t just limited to bystanders. Before the class, mascots seemed like rather whimsical elements of daily life in Japan. But after having donned a costume, high fives, hugs, and other more physical interactions suddenly feel a lot less out of place than they usually would in a room full of strangers. With the relative lack of these interactions in daily life here, it feels like a breath of fresh air. The social role of mascots—and their popularity—is a lot more apparent now.
But then the costumes come off again, and most of the participants go back to their regular selves, with a wave or a short bow being the preferred way of saying goodbye. What happens as a mascot, stays with the costume. Yet I do detect a small change: everyone, myself included, does seem slightly more cheerful than before.
